THE PARENT
TRAPYou might think that L.A. Unified would actually
want parents like Oscar Almaguer. But think again. The 42-year-old
father, booted off a districtwide advisory council, was handcuffed
when he refused to leave a meeting last month. Was his main offense
asking too many questions? BY HOWARD BLUME

IMPERIAL
TIMESMARC B. HAEFELE pleads the case for the Salton Sea,
and against the Timesí endorsement of robbing the Imperial
Valley of its life-giving water.

THE FICTIONAL CANDIDATEBill Simon
Jr. may like to think heís a Reaganite. But hear what the likes
of Lyn Nofziger and Ed Rollins have to say. BY BILL
BRADLEY

A CONSIDERABLE
FICTIONGod Save the King: August 16 marks the 25th
anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. Four and a half months
later, on January 2, 1978, the Sex Pistols arrived in America for
their brief, abortive tour, and the seam of history unraveled.
Coincidence? A short story by PAUL CULLUM.Plus, SNAP: a
photograph by TED SOQUI.

DISSONANCETaking
down Saddam doesnít make any more sense today than it did 10 years
ago. But only the right-wingers in Congress seem to have figured it
out. BY MARC COOPER

DEADLINE
HOLLYWOODWhat was once respect and admiration for Disney
has turned into scorn and exasperation. But this fish stinks at the
head: is Michael Eisner rancid? BY NIKKI FINKE

CAKEWALKInto
the groove: Dancing for time, forever. BY ERIN AUBRY
KAPLAN

Another FBI Agent Blows
the WhistleNew
evidence that the Bureau quashed another terror probe
before 9/11by Jim
Crogan

Wright: Heís ready
to talk.

WHEN FBI COUNSEL COLLEEN ROWLEY DROPPED
her bombshell, a now-famous letter to the director,
detailing how bureau higher-ups thwarted attempts to
investigate accused 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui,
before the September 11 attacks, she set off a
firestorm. The scorching produced a mea culpa of sorts
in June from FBI Director Robert Mueller and a promise
of reform.

Now there's another whistle blower
telling a similar pre-9/11 tale. And so far, the FBI has
gone to great lengths to silence him.

The Weekly has learned that
Chicago-based special agent Robert Wright has accused
the agency of shutting down his 1998 criminal probe into
alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas
City. The apparent goal of the training camps, according
to confidential documents obtained by the Weekly,
was to recruit and train Palestinian-American youths,
who would then slip into Israel. Recruits at these camps
reportedly received weapons training and instruction in
bomb-making techniques in the early 1990s. The
bomb-making curriculum included the sort of explosives
later used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. And
government documents state that two trainees came from
the Oklahoma City area.

One alleged trainer at the terror camps
is now fending off a government lawsuit to seize his
bank accounts, car and property for alleged money
laundering on behalf of the militant group Hamas. So
far, no one has been prosecuted for these alleged
terrorism-related activities.

The official government position is that
Middle Eastern groups had no involvement in the 1995
bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh, and that
conclusion may stand the test of time. The FBI, however,
never fully investigated leads suggesting a different
verdict, according to law-enforcement and government
sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Congressional investigators are starting to re-examine
the entire matter. There's also another troubling
question: Why has the FBI dismissed or ignored evidence
linking the Oklahoma City bombing to the Middle East? Is
it because these leads are unlikely to pan out or
because the agency still has something to hide regarding
its own intelligence-gathering lapses?

ROBERT WRIGHT'S STORY IS DIFFICULT TO
PIECE together because he is on government orders to
remain silent. And by extension so are his attorneys
when it comes to confidential information. Wright has
written a book, but the agency won't let him publish it
or even give it to anyone. All of this is in distinct
contrast to the free speech and whistle-blower
protections offered to Colleen Rowley, general counsel
in the FBI Minneapolis office, who got her story out
before the agency could silence her.

Wright, a 12-year bureau veteran, has
followed proper channels, sending his book off for an
internal review and asking for permission to respond to
reporters' queries. Neither of those efforts panned out,
and he has since sued the agency over this publication
ban. The best he could do was a May 30 press conference
in Washington, D.C., where he told curious reporters
that he had a whopper of a tale to tell, if only he
could.

Wright did say that FBI bureaucrats
"intentionally and repeatedly thwarted his attempts to
launch a more comprehensive investigation to identify
and neutralize terrorists." And that "FBI management
failed to take seriously the threat of terrorism in the
U.S." Wright was careful not to illegally disclose any
confidential details about what he knew, but tears
filled his eyes as he apologized to the families of
September 11 victims for the Bureau's mistakes leading
up to 9/11. He also made a tantalizing reference to his
removal from a money-laundering case that, he implied,
had a direct connection to investigations into
terrorism.

This still-active case centers on
Mohammed Abdul Hamid Khalil Salah, 49, a naturalized
American citizen who was born in Jerusalem. Salah has
described himself as a humanitarian who distributed
money collected in the U.S. to needy West Bank
Palestinian families. He's also reportedly worked in
Arab-owned grocery stores, as a used car salesman and as
a computer analyst for a Chicago-based Islamic
charitable group, the Quranic Literacy Institute, which
the FBI alleges was involved in money laundering.
Institute and Muslim leaders have vehemently denied any
wrongdoing.

Both the American and Israeli
governments contend that Salah served as a money courier
for the terrorist group Hamas. Salah's attorney in the
civil action, Mathew Piers, did not return phone calls
from the Weekly. But in published accounts, Piers
adamantly denied that his client was a bagman for Hamas.
Salah and his wife are still living

in Chicago in a house the government is
trying to seize.

In June 1998, the feds filed a civil
assets-forfeiture suit against Salah. Such actions are
frequently used to seize the money and property of drug
dealers. In the Salah case, the U.S. Attorney's Office
went after personal property and accounts in seven
banks, with a total estimated value of $1.5 million. In
the civil complaint, the government alleged that Salah
intended the funds would "support a conspiracy involving
international terrorist activities, [and] the domestic
recruitment and training in support of such activities,
including extortion, kidnapping and murder of citizens
of Israel."

Attached to the complaint is a 40-page
sworn affidavit from agent Wright. In it, Wright details
bank accounts, property deals and money transfers
designed to support Hamas. But among the most intriguing
elements is a reference to Salah's earlier trial in
Israel, which received substantial press coverage in
Israel at the time.

In 1993, Israeli intelligence arrested
Salah and another naturalized American, Mohammed Jarad,
on suspicion of transferring hundreds of thousands of
dollars to Hamas for guns and ammunition.

Salah was interrogated by Israeli
military intelligence -- he says he was tortured, a
claim the Israelis deny. Under interrogation, Salah
reportedly confessed to recruiting Islamic militants and
then helping to instruct them in the use of poisons,
chemical weapons and explosives. The training supposedly
occurred in the late 1980s. Later, in 1991, Salah
allegedly served as a financial agent for Hamas, opening
accounts at a number of Chicago-area banks. Wright's
affidavit states that between June 1991 and December
1992, Salah spent more than $100,000 in direct support
of Hamas military activities. Wright added that the
weapons purchased were used in Hamas assaults and
suicide attacks on Israeli citizens.

In 1994, at Salah's secret military
trial, Israeli prosecutors introduced a statement signed
by another Palestinian detainee, Naser Hidmi, formerly a
student at Kansas State University. Hidmi stated in an
affidavit that he accepted Salah's invitation to a
four-day "retreat" at a camp in the Chicago area in June
1990. At the camp, he reportedly studied Hamas
philosophy and received explosives training. Hidmi also
asserted in his statement that he met Salah again at a
conference of Muslim youth held in Kansas City in
December of the same year. On that occasion, Hidmi
claimed he got more Hamas training and Salah
participated in the instruction.

In 1995, Salah pleaded guilty to
funneling funds to Hamas and he served about five years
in prison before being released and deported to the U.S.
Mohammed Jarah served six months in jail following a
plea bargain to a lesser charge.

While Salah sat in an Israeli prison,
the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets
Control added his name to the list of "Specially
Designated Terrorists," because of his alleged Hamas
connections. After he returned to Chicago, Salah found
himself squarely in the FBI's crosshairs. In 1995,
Wright began investigating money laundering on behalf of
international terrorist organizations. This
investigation led him to Salah.

Wright's affidavit alleges that Mousa
Mohammed Abu Marzook, a Hamas leader, directed Salah's
activites, at one point authorizing him to give $790,000
to Hamas military units. The Israeli government indicted
Marzook, while he was living in the U.S., for abetting
terror attacks in Israel. American authorities arrested
Marzook and held him for two years before deporting him
to Jordan.

Wright also alleged that Salah funneled
money through Switzerland via Saudi businessman Yassin
Kadi. The U.S. government has since designated Kadi as a
financial supporter of Osama bin Laden and frozen his
American assets. Kadi too has denied any
wrongdoing.

The assets-forfeiture case against
Salah, which was filed in an Illinois federal court,
remains active. Wright was removed from the case shortly
after it was filed. And he would apparently contend, if
allowed to talk, that his FBI superiors ordered him to
drop any criminal investigation into Salah and the
terrorist camps allegedly run by Hamas.

WRIGHT'S WAS NOT THE ONLY PROBE of
Middle Eastern links to terrorists and acts of terror in
the U.S. Unbeknownst to Wright, an investigation of
Salah and his alleged involvement in training camps was
undertaken by the House of Representatives Republican
Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. This
task force, as previously reported in the Weekly,
had issued alerts to law enforcement and U.S.
intelligence agencies in the months prior to the
Oklahoma City bombing. It had warned of an impending
Islamist terror campaign, allegedly run by Hamas and
directed by Iran.

After the 1995 blast, Oklahoma
City­based television reporter Jayna Davis spoke
numerous times with task-force executive director Yossef
Bodansky. He eventually gave her a memo in which he'd
summarized intelligence reports detailing the operations
of the terror camps. In the memo, constructed from his
intelligence reports, Bodansky wrote that Iranian
intelligence had ordered Hamas to develop cadres from
among Palestinian youth living in the U.S.

"The idea," Bodansky wrote, "was to
build a group of highly trained Arabs with U.S.
passports who can be inserted into Israel to replace
local cadres killed or arrested by Israeli Forces." The
Iranians, Bodansky contended, argued that Israel would
treat the Americans with "kid gloves." He also stated it
would be easier for these recruits to infiltrate Israel
with U.S. documents.

Bodansky declined to be interviewed by
the Weekly, but in the memo, Bodansky also
alleged that the first round of training took place in
Chicago, "organized by Muhammad Salah" in 1990. Bodansky
stated that "25 trainees" took part and all were given
code names.

"Salah and five other instructors,
including a Libyan-American, who was a former Marine,"
he wrote, conducted training. The instruction included
military topics, sabotage, and one group received
"detailed instructions on building car bombs from
readily available, off the shelf materials."

Bodansky also wrote that a second round
of training occurred at a December 1990 Hamas youth
conference in Kansas City. "Secret sessions," he added,
"were devoted to leadership and command training."
Another round of training also occurred in Kansas City
in 1991. During this meeting, he said, some people were
given "highly detailed and practical instructions in
supervising the construction of explosives, including
car bombs like the one used in Oklahoma City."

The operatives, Bodansky stated, were
then assigned to locations throughout the U.S. He also
alleged that so-called "Lilly whites" were subsequently
trained at the same Chicago camps in 1993. These were
people, whose backgrounds he stated, would not make them
suspect. These individuals were given weapons training
as well as the latest instruction in bomb-making
techniques. Two individuals from Oklahoma City, he
added, attended this camp. Bodansky did not name these
men.

The information supplied to reporter
Davis mirrors the information about Salah and the terror
training camps that emerged from Israel and through
Wright's affidavit. Wright's attorney told the
Weekly that Wright knew nothing of Bodansky's
parallel investigation.

TO DATE, THE FBI AND DEPARTMENT OF
Justice have seemingly exerted more effort in shutting
down these leads than pursuing them. Last October, the
Justice Department blocked the court appearance of
retired Oklahoma City FBI agent Dan Vogel at a hearing
in the state murder case against convicted Oklahoma
City­accomplice Terry Nichols. In an interview with
the Weekly, Vogel said he intended to tell the
court the truth -- that he had accepted evidence from
former TV reporter Jayna Davis that tied Timothy
McVeigh, Nichols and a group of Iraqis working in
Oklahoma City to a larger bombing conspiracy.

Vogel said he passed the materials to
the Bureau but was later told the documents were
returned because of questions regarding who owned the
documents. Davis and her attorneys contend that the
documents were never returned. Whatever the case, the
Bureau's reputed rationale for spurning potential
evidence is slim indeed.

Wright got no explanation at all when he
was ordered to cease his own probe, said Chicago-based
attorney David Schippers, who is representing Wright
along with Judicial Watch, a Washington, D.C.­based
legal foundation. (Schippers is most famous for his role
as lead counsel spearheading the House impeachment of
former President Bill Clinton.) "Bob was simply pulled
off these investigations," said Schippers. The FBI "just
shut down the operations and never told him why."

The FBI and the Department of Justice
declined comment for this story.

Wright chronicled his allegations
against the Bureau in a complaint filed with the
Inspector General's Office of the Department of Justice.
The FBI, in turn, has threatened to discipline or fire
Wright if he publicizes the details of the complaint.
The Inspector General's Office has failed to act,
referring the matter to Congress instead. And there,
finally, investigators got interested, and called Wright
in for an interview, said sources close to the
investigation. It remains to be seen how far and how
vigorously these leads will be pursued.